Right! I dunno how many times I have told UX designers (nearly always under 30 and just babies, really) that I cannot read their tiny crap on tiny devices. Cannot. Have to get out glasses. They always ignore it. Considering throwing away my crappy phone for this very reason.
This is modded -1? Why? The poster is saying that we shouldn't be surprised that people who like coding want to continue coding regardless of age but that ageist stereotypes (wrongly) insist that all coders should be scabby teens.
Taboos and power structures are of course closely related. Breaking a taboo is transgression and in part says "to hell with what society says I can't do, I'm me and I'm rebelling against that power (and am therefore powerful)". Transgression is frequently eroticized.
You also have to remember that the human brain also has to handle all of those useless background process like "breathing" and "heartbeats".
Fyi those are called autonomic functions and are handled by low level centers in the reptillian part of the brain that only do that stuff and things like balance and the other complex bodily coordination tasks that we normally don't need to think about. Some of it happens in the spinal cord alone. Some functions can control themselves if all connections to the central nervous system are severed (the heart is like this and has a built-in processor of its own). Actual conscious thinking happens in high level centers like the frontal cortex. So these things happen on different (connected) machines if you will. Every neuron is a processor in itself anyway.
If you only took into account the user-taskable portion of the brain, then computers have surpassed that level a loooooong time ago.
Because you're not reading it properly. I said this:
If it's sophisticated, difficult code, hiring someone to get across and then hack the code base may just be too slow a fix commercially.
In which case an emergency commercial line of support is essential. Not to mention that some specialized areas of development are exotic and it's hard and slow hiring those guys. They are usually already hired. That is not to say that oss is not a far superior model if you can get hold of the resources to work on the codebase. Closed source is bad because it removes that possibility altogether if the copyright holders don't want you to do it. There is no reason smart FOSS projects should not be able to provide or foster code-level technical support (provided this is not in breach of their existing employment contracts, which it often will be), just as there is no reason they cannot commercially (dual) license out their codebase while also keeping it open source (X264 comes to mind). But it's difficult to name examples.
This is why Apple bought out key FreeBSD developers when they built OS X. If it had been otherwise, can you imagine chasing them around trying to get stuff done while Steve Jobs screamed at you?
No. What I'm saying is that companies that developed new products tended (pre-Android) to steer clear of foss precisely because of the perception that they might have to chase some hacker around his mother's basement to find and code some obscure and highly specific issue very quickly. That code issue issue might be of no relevance to anyone else. Windriver and Monta Vista improved this by hiring and building foss expertise extensively (like Google) and providing their own embedded linux platforms for ODMs with support etc. You can try going to those sorts of companies but they are usually looking for Big Work so good luck; some start-up's idiosyncratic, highly specialized issue is just not going to be very profitable for them. And you sign an NDA and very probably a non-compete agreement that will prevent you poaching their devs.
None of this lessens my belief in open source and I do think it is about market dominance. Also, I'm sure the situation must have improved by now (I hope). Whichever platform is dominant will very likely have an ecosystem of commercial development consultancies around it. Intermediaries that find the appropriate foss expertise on your behalf, and that will probably take on small projects, like http://www.igalia.com/, are a step in the right direction.
None of that is relevant to my point. Linux only thrived on servers before Android took it to the masses. Google has huge technical capability of its own.
mfw he hasn't ever given KDE much as a sideways glance after all these years.
Incorrect. IIRC he praised KDE over Gnome a few years ago and admitted he used KDE and disliked the direction Gnome was taking, pretty sure it was on/. I thought I must have been looking at an old post at first.
Speaking from experience here and also as a strong believer in FOSS: the single biggest hassle with using certain FOSS code for commercial use/adaptation can be getting hold of the right person to modify/fix the code for use in a for-profit project. You'd think it'd be easy, right? Just post to the dev list and start a discussion offline about paying them for adaptations, right?
Wrong. Usually doesn't work if you go in cold and the devs don't know who you are, even if you start shaking bags of cash at them over email. Many foss developers work for other companies and aren't interested. If it's sophisticated, difficult code, hiring someone to get across and then hack the code base may just be too slow a fix commercially. This is why Google, Red Hat, Canonical etc snap up key foss developers in challenging areas such as the kernel. Even if their pool of key developers don't know how to fix something, chances are they might know how to get hold of the right person. Notice the inbuilt randomness of "chances are".
The ad hoc-ness of that situation is just not acceptable in many industries. They want to pick up a phone and get the work done now, not chase people around on an obscure development list trying to hire them. It's no wonder that Microsoft et al had the game sown up for so long and that it took a huge company with massive resources (Google) to put linux on so many devices that weren't server boxes.
Quite possibly. The point I was making is that human society seems to need people - The Other - who can be stripped of any humanity on the basis of one labelled characteristic or another. But show me some evidence that says stripping anyone of their humanity actually improves society. There's no evidence to support the death penalty as a successful deterrent for example. Yet it is still used as the ultimate demonstration of State power and to satisfy a sadistic yearning and frustration in the populace. That is what it is for; it has nothing to do with "justice" or crime prevention, anyone who believes so is an idiot. The labels change but the process itself of identifying sections of society to be ostracized, even tortured while society stands by approvingly (eg society facilitates rape in prison since stopping this crime is actually a quite easy problem to solve - all it needs is surveillance +/- single occupant cells). Usually the process is irrational - if not outright counterproductive - and its ostensible goals quite irrelevant to what is actually happening (which few admit so as not to "side with the enemy") but it's a highly successful tool for manipulating the unwashed. All we need is some justification, oftentimes a recourse to old falsehoods, half truths or ingrained, dangerously simplistic ideas about good/evil.
The problem is this: dogmatic adherence to strictly one side only of the nature/nurture divide usually has a sociopolitical view attached to it, with a good dollop of cant and stupidity. Any defense of "nature" is seen as a possible justification to label one genetic group as inferior, even of eugenics, or, paradoxically, to defend an undesired trait as "natural". This is partly because humanities and social "science" people do not understand science or statistical outliers and see any non-pc "unacceptable" argument as the thin end of some oppressive political wedge. So we have hegemony and actual knowledge suffers. Rather like the Church threatening Galileo, in postmodernity one is not currently allowed to say that a behavioral trait is actually inherited or may have evolved to convey some sort of biological advantage. Male and female brains have very identifiable statistical morphological and functional differences. The idea that women are just boys raised to play with dolls has done immeasurable harm to (say) boys born with ambiguous genitalia who were surgically "reassigned" as infants and raised as girls (and visa versa).
It's speculative inquiry and it's perfectly fine scientific activity. It's quite common in theoretical physics to imagine or concoct various system parameters - either reasonable or wild - and see where those assumptions lead. Einstein's choice of the GR field equations was in part an educated stab that turned out to work. Physics is full of ideas that we accept as ok but that began life as a guess.
So in your opinion, if someone is bad in one area, they are all bad, and they cannot redeem themselves ever?
You must be a lot of fun at parties.
--
BMO
Many people seem to think like this. Really stupid thinking that results in damning different sections of humanity to the pit every 50 years or so. Used to be gays, women: now it's pedophiles and immigrants.
A great deal can be achieved in 4 hours of quiet and solitude in an intense, high-concentration work session. For that, working from home is ideal. Four solid hours of real high-intensity brain work beats 8-12 hours of fooling around, coffee breaks, chats etc. I'll often work in a solid hard lump like that if I need to maintain the pace and keep up the concentration, and I can get a great deal done. Same on hobby projects. Then I'll have a two hour meal break. I think it can be very efficient work mode for some issues since you don't have to keep picking up where you left off.
All the large corps despise and repel general members of the public who want to actually talk. Once I tried to approach Amazon to initiate discussions on a possible venture on behalf of my well-resourced clients. It turned out to be almost impossible to get through to the right human, barriers placed at each phone doorway. Really infuriating. I eventually got a response by emailing Bezon himself.
Right. Why fall into the masochistic, exploited trap of thinking you're a hero simply because you work long hours. Better to enjoy your work and have a life.
Right. Like my old man used to say, you don't get the high salaries without the stress and hours. While he was a senior manager, he preferred to have a life and so did not chase the very high powered jobs.
Actually, the statistical fact is that POVERTY varies roughly inversely as fertility. Once the standard of living rises in a given community, birthrates drop. Obesity also increases with poverty. If we want birthrates to fall in those communities, then raise the standard of living. It's guaranteed that birthrates will fall.
Companies have largely moved to sourcing MIT/BSD-licensed code when we need open source components. The GPL is great but there's usually too many copyleft issues to enable commercial development unless the copyright holders agree to relicense the code (eg as they did with X264). The other huge problem with much of the GPL'd world is it can be very hard to find appropriate consultanvy expertise to adapt/fix/apply code. I've put out open offers of serious consultancy fees to foss development lists in one specialized area and got not one reply. They may not have thought it for real, but it was. I'm talking (eg) $1000/day for reliable work by a senior developer of a project. That was the first time I *really* understood why companies want a huge ecosystem of on-demand *commercial* support (ie no deliver, no pay), why Linux took so long to take over embedded devices, and why megacorps like Google employ senior kernel devs like Andrew Morton, and the fact it's oss or not isn't seen as so relevant (though it is). Going to Big Shooters like Canonical, Red Hat or Windriver etc doesn't always help like you'd think. Microsoft have been able to play on this for years.
Most famously, Perl people can get their knickers in a knot about calling a Perl program a "script", which is felt to be diminishing (rationally or not), since Perl is compiled to bytecode (depending on how it runs) and thus is not an interpreted or so-called "scripting" language. It can be autoconverted to C (not sure how good that is) and it can be compiled to binaries.
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You might consider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique . It works.
Right! I dunno how many times I have told UX designers (nearly always under 30 and just babies, really) that I cannot read their tiny crap on tiny devices. Cannot. Have to get out glasses. They always ignore it. Considering throwing away my crappy phone for this very reason.
This is modded -1? Why? The poster is saying that we shouldn't be surprised that people who like coding want to continue coding regardless of age but that ageist stereotypes (wrongly) insist that all coders should be scabby teens.
Taboos and power structures are of course closely related. Breaking a taboo is transgression and in part says "to hell with what society says I can't do, I'm me and I'm rebelling against that power (and am therefore powerful)". Transgression is frequently eroticized.
Actually, to correct myself, it's specific types of thinking (involving planning) that happen in the frontal cortex. IANAB (not a biologist).
You also have to remember that the human brain also has to handle all of those useless background process like "breathing" and "heartbeats".
Fyi those are called autonomic functions and are handled by low level centers in the reptillian part of the brain that only do that stuff and things like balance and the other complex bodily coordination tasks that we normally don't need to think about. Some of it happens in the spinal cord alone. Some functions can control themselves if all connections to the central nervous system are severed (the heart is like this and has a built-in processor of its own). Actual conscious thinking happens in high level centers like the frontal cortex. So these things happen on different (connected) machines if you will. Every neuron is a processor in itself anyway.
If you only took into account the user-taskable portion of the brain, then computers have surpassed that level a loooooong time ago.
Citation needed.
If it's sophisticated, difficult code, hiring someone to get across and then hack the code base may just be too slow a fix commercially.
In which case an emergency commercial line of support is essential. Not to mention that some specialized areas of development are exotic and it's hard and slow hiring those guys. They are usually already hired. That is not to say that oss is not a far superior model if you can get hold of the resources to work on the codebase. Closed source is bad because it removes that possibility altogether if the copyright holders don't want you to do it. There is no reason smart FOSS projects should not be able to provide or foster code-level technical support (provided this is not in breach of their existing employment contracts, which it often will be), just as there is no reason they cannot commercially (dual) license out their codebase while also keeping it open source (X264 comes to mind). But it's difficult to name examples.
This is why Apple bought out key FreeBSD developers when they built OS X. If it had been otherwise, can you imagine chasing them around trying to get stuff done while Steve Jobs screamed at you?
No. What I'm saying is that companies that developed new products tended (pre-Android) to steer clear of foss precisely because of the perception that they might have to chase some hacker around his mother's basement to find and code some obscure and highly specific issue very quickly. That code issue issue might be of no relevance to anyone else. Windriver and Monta Vista improved this by hiring and building foss expertise extensively (like Google) and providing their own embedded linux platforms for ODMs with support etc. You can try going to those sorts of companies but they are usually looking for Big Work so good luck; some start-up's idiosyncratic, highly specialized issue is just not going to be very profitable for them. And you sign an NDA and very probably a non-compete agreement that will prevent you poaching their devs.
None of this lessens my belief in open source and I do think it is about market dominance. Also, I'm sure the situation must have improved by now (I hope). Whichever platform is dominant will very likely have an ecosystem of commercial development consultancies around it. Intermediaries that find the appropriate foss expertise on your behalf, and that will probably take on small projects, like http://www.igalia.com/, are a step in the right direction.
None of that is relevant to my point. Linux only thrived on servers before Android took it to the masses. Google has huge technical capability of its own.
mfw he hasn't ever given KDE much as a sideways glance after all these years.
Incorrect. IIRC he praised KDE over Gnome a few years ago and admitted he used KDE and disliked the direction Gnome was taking, pretty sure it was on /. I thought I must have been looking at an old post at first.
Speaking from experience here and also as a strong believer in FOSS: the single biggest hassle with using certain FOSS code for commercial use/adaptation can be getting hold of the right person to modify/fix the code for use in a for-profit project. You'd think it'd be easy, right? Just post to the dev list and start a discussion offline about paying them for adaptations, right?
Wrong. Usually doesn't work if you go in cold and the devs don't know who you are, even if you start shaking bags of cash at them over email. Many foss developers work for other companies and aren't interested. If it's sophisticated, difficult code, hiring someone to get across and then hack the code base may just be too slow a fix commercially. This is why Google, Red Hat, Canonical etc snap up key foss developers in challenging areas such as the kernel. Even if their pool of key developers don't know how to fix something, chances are they might know how to get hold of the right person. Notice the inbuilt randomness of "chances are".
The ad hoc-ness of that situation is just not acceptable in many industries. They want to pick up a phone and get the work done now, not chase people around on an obscure development list trying to hire them. It's no wonder that Microsoft et al had the game sown up for so long and that it took a huge company with massive resources (Google) to put linux on so many devices that weren't server boxes.
Quite possibly. The point I was making is that human society seems to need people - The Other - who can be stripped of any humanity on the basis of one labelled characteristic or another. But show me some evidence that says stripping anyone of their humanity actually improves society. There's no evidence to support the death penalty as a successful deterrent for example. Yet it is still used as the ultimate demonstration of State power and to satisfy a sadistic yearning and frustration in the populace. That is what it is for; it has nothing to do with "justice" or crime prevention, anyone who believes so is an idiot. The labels change but the process itself of identifying sections of society to be ostracized, even tortured while society stands by approvingly (eg society facilitates rape in prison since stopping this crime is actually a quite easy problem to solve - all it needs is surveillance +/- single occupant cells). Usually the process is irrational - if not outright counterproductive - and its ostensible goals quite irrelevant to what is actually happening (which few admit so as not to "side with the enemy") but it's a highly successful tool for manipulating the unwashed. All we need is some justification, oftentimes a recourse to old falsehoods, half truths or ingrained, dangerously simplistic ideas about good/evil.
The problem is this: dogmatic adherence to strictly one side only of the nature/nurture divide usually has a sociopolitical view attached to it, with a good dollop of cant and stupidity. Any defense of "nature" is seen as a possible justification to label one genetic group as inferior, even of eugenics, or, paradoxically, to defend an undesired trait as "natural". This is partly because humanities and social "science" people do not understand science or statistical outliers and see any non-pc "unacceptable" argument as the thin end of some oppressive political wedge. So we have hegemony and actual knowledge suffers. Rather like the Church threatening Galileo, in postmodernity one is not currently allowed to say that a behavioral trait is actually inherited or may have evolved to convey some sort of biological advantage. Male and female brains have very identifiable statistical morphological and functional differences. The idea that women are just boys raised to play with dolls has done immeasurable harm to (say) boys born with ambiguous genitalia who were surgically "reassigned" as infants and raised as girls (and visa versa).
It's speculative inquiry and it's perfectly fine scientific activity. It's quite common in theoretical physics to imagine or concoct various system parameters - either reasonable or wild - and see where those assumptions lead. Einstein's choice of the GR field equations was in part an educated stab that turned out to work. Physics is full of ideas that we accept as ok but that began life as a guess.
So in your opinion, if someone is bad in one area, they are all bad, and they cannot redeem themselves ever?
You must be a lot of fun at parties.
-- BMO
Many people seem to think like this. Really stupid thinking that results in damning different sections of humanity to the pit every 50 years or so. Used to be gays, women: now it's pedophiles and immigrants.
A great deal can be achieved in 4 hours of quiet and solitude in an intense, high-concentration work session. For that, working from home is ideal. Four solid hours of real high-intensity brain work beats 8-12 hours of fooling around, coffee breaks, chats etc. I'll often work in a solid hard lump like that if I need to maintain the pace and keep up the concentration, and I can get a great deal done. Same on hobby projects. Then I'll have a two hour meal break. I think it can be very efficient work mode for some issues since you don't have to keep picking up where you left off.
Don't forget some of us geeks don't have what others would regard as a normal life to go home to. Sometimes the stereotype fits.
All the large corps despise and repel general members of the public who want to actually talk. Once I tried to approach Amazon to initiate discussions on a possible venture on behalf of my well-resourced clients. It turned out to be almost impossible to get through to the right human, barriers placed at each phone doorway. Really infuriating. I eventually got a response by emailing Bezon himself.
Right. Why fall into the masochistic, exploited trap of thinking you're a hero simply because you work long hours. Better to enjoy your work and have a life.
Right. Like my old man used to say, you don't get the high salaries without the stress and hours. While he was a senior manager, he preferred to have a life and so did not chase the very high powered jobs.
I don't think all startups and small outfits bother with all this. Maybe checking references, yes.
Actually, the statistical fact is that POVERTY varies roughly inversely as fertility. Once the standard of living rises in a given community, birthrates drop. Obesity also increases with poverty. If we want birthrates to fall in those communities, then raise the standard of living. It's guaranteed that birthrates will fall.
.. for Gnome3
Companies have largely moved to sourcing MIT/BSD-licensed code when we need open source components. The GPL is great but there's usually too many copyleft issues to enable commercial development unless the copyright holders agree to relicense the code (eg as they did with X264). The other huge problem with much of the GPL'd world is it can be very hard to find appropriate consultanvy expertise to adapt/fix/apply code. I've put out open offers of serious consultancy fees to foss development lists in one specialized area and got not one reply. They may not have thought it for real, but it was. I'm talking (eg) $1000/day for reliable work by a senior developer of a project. That was the first time I *really* understood why companies want a huge ecosystem of on-demand *commercial* support (ie no deliver, no pay), why Linux took so long to take over embedded devices, and why megacorps like Google employ senior kernel devs like Andrew Morton, and the fact it's oss or not isn't seen as so relevant (though it is). Going to Big Shooters like Canonical, Red Hat or Windriver etc doesn't always help like you'd think. Microsoft have been able to play on this for years.
Most famously, Perl people can get their knickers in a knot about calling a Perl program a "script", which is felt to be diminishing (rationally or not), since Perl is compiled to bytecode (depending on how it runs) and thus is not an interpreted or so-called "scripting" language. It can be autoconverted to C (not sure how good that is) and it can be compiled to binaries.